ABSTRACT
This book is one take on college and race. It is based on interviews with fifty-five college-educated African Americans in the Chicago area during 1990 and 1991. The people I interviewed were undergraduate students between 1967 and 1989 at either historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., or predominantly white Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.1 Desiring to understand my own experience at a predominantly white college with one semester spent at a historically black one, I decided to speak with African-American alumni and alumnae of two institutions of higher education, comparable (as I show in chapter 4) but for the racial composition of their student bodies. I wondered why some African Americans chose mostly white colleges and others chose historically black ones. I wondered if the racial sense African Americans had of themselves was influenced by the college they attended. I was especially interested in the ways that formal equality coexisted with informal inequality-that is to say, the contradiction that everyone is equal on paper because discrimination has been made illegal and the reality that most people of color still experience racial discrimination.
